'Bred Crumbs
09.17.02
I had considered at some point writing a humorous little Fall TV Preview here, but I've ditched the idea. In the first place, I really didn't have much to say; the only thing was to note the sad irony that NBC is finally putting a decent show on at 8:30 Thursdays just when the increasingly incestuous Friends have become unwatchably maudlin and laugh-free. (Creative resurgence, my ass.)
And then, the only TV show that really excited me got canceled, and now I'm so fed up with the whole network corporate money-grubbing Nielsen-watching mediocrity-nourishing system that I just can't give a shit. So networks, you can keep your 963 shows about doctors in San Francisco that somehow don't have gays or Asians, your 538 shows in which people relive their high-school days, your 414 stodgy forensics-analysis knockoffs, your 226 single dads raising children and other tired nuclear-family permutations, your couple of undemanded '60s-series remakes, all your Laws and Orders and amateur hours, and your already overhyped space Western out of my face. Feel free to leave the few truly gourmet morsels left from seasons past, which sadly are countable on one hand – The Simpsons, Gilmore Girls, The Daily Show* and the last few crumbs of our former champ in getting screwed over by a cheap network, Futurama. Otherwise, be gone with you.
Unless one of you happens to pick up a certain beloved but marooned series. Then we'll talk.
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Before abandoning the topic of TV for a while, I have some notes on one older network space-filler-upper, Everybody Loves Raymond, which I finally saw numerous times this past season because its syndicated reruns fell between Simpsonses.** On the one hand, it's funnier than I would have expected, with zippy dialogue and impeccable comic timing. One the other hand, it's a disturbing indictment of heterosexual marriage.
For those who've never watched, the show is about a dim-witted sportswriter who somehow has duped a woman who clearly loathes him into marrying and breeding with him. And they have decided to live across the street from two people they both detest, his parents, who also have mutually destructively engaged in a long-term relationship in spite of the fact that they'd rather take a weedwhacker to the heart than spend another minute with each other. So when there's a lag between gags, you're left with this spectacle of marriage as an inexplicably undertaken ordeal of self-torment.
If there were such a thing as a gay recruitment film, I'd think this would be one. Especially with that parental kitchen being so John Waters tacky.
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Meanwhile, back in real life, my older nephew's coming into town tomorrow, his first trip to San Fran. It may be kind of weird that I'll be just hanging out in adulthood with this person I watched grow up. Or it may be that we'll be too busy kicking back tiki drinks for it to cross my mind.
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